mermerings @mermerings - Tumblr Blog

The most vulnerable parts of our nature are often those closest to our greatest gifts.

Roger Cohen, “Do Not Go Gentle,” New York Times (December 2, 2016) http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/opinion/do-not-go-gentle.html

The city is not merely a repository of pleasures. It is the stage on which we fight our battles, where we act out the drama of our own lives. It can enhance or corrode our ability to cope with everyday challenges. It can steal our autonomy or give us the freedom to thrive. It can offer a navigable environment, or it can create a series of impossible gauntlets that wear us down daily. The messages encoded in architecture and systems can foster a sense of mastery or helplessness. The good city should be measured not only be its distractions and amenities but also by how it affects this everyday drama of survival, work, and meaning.

Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

I will add but a word. We are all very near despair. The sheathing that floats us over its waves is compounded of hope, faith in the unexplainable worth and sure issue of effort, and the deep, sub-conscious content which comes from the exercise of our powers.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., from the introduction to The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs

#janejacobs #oliver wendell holmes #thedeathandlifeofgreatamericancities

I will try to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening scope, but enjoying the freedom that scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision, that I have perceived nothing completely, that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.

from Corsons Inlet, A.R. Ammons

#poetry #arammons #corsonsinlet

Double Happiness and Hops

Dearest Friends,

Please save the date and consider a gift of financial support for Embrace 2015 | Taste of Asia, an exciting event I’m co-hosting on Wednesday, May 6, 2015, from 6-9 pm at Monday Night Brewing. Organized to benefit Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Atlanta, this Asian Heritage Month celebration will feature great food from Atlanta’s top Asian restaurants and chefs, fantastic brews from a favorite local brewery, and stimulating company with your fellow epicureans and engaged citizens.

I’m proud to contribute to Embrace 2015, which signifies weaving together the oft-fragmented histories and hopes of Asian immigrants and refugees into collective wisdom and power. As a daughter and granddaughter of Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants, a mother to biracial children, and a decade-long transplant to Atlanta, I understand, as many of you do, regardless of how many generations removed you are from immigrant status, that profound displacement often results in an intense awareness of your own limitations and strengths, as well as your own truths.

I understand, because, after things fell apart over a year ago, I found a refuge – and myself – in Atlanta’s restaurant industry, behind a hostess stand, unsurprising perhaps for someone whose birth certificate lists “waiter” for father’s occupation. One year behind that hostess stand has led directly to conceptualizing, planning, and now executing Embrace 2015. Sometimes it takes a sudden and wholesale disruption of one’s existence for seemingly disparate life experiences to coalesce in wondrous ways.

Helping to organize and host this event is my tribute to my family, to my restaurant family, to all “strangers from a different shore,” and to the individuals and organizations that have helped each of us find a home, a family, a path. Your commitment, along with the invaluable efforts of groups like Advancing Justice – Atlanta, will develop leaders, activists, and servants who reflect our faces and our stories. I hope that by witnessing our dedication and such progress, my children – our children – will realize their identity is neither predicament nor punchline but an anchor and an arrow to their dreams.

Please join me in supporting the important work of Advancing Justice – Atlanta and the overwhelming generosity and community spirit of Embrace 2015’s restaurants and chefs in any of the following ways: purchasing tickets to attend the event; matching my personal contribution of $500 (or any amount); or spreading the word to your family, friends, and co-workers. Thank you for your kindness and support.

Yours truly,

Marian

Embrace 2015 Co-Host and Board Member, Advancing Justice – Atlanta

A model minority is a tractable, one-dimensional simulacrum of a person, stripped of complexity, nuance, danger and sexuality — a person devoid of dramatic interest. Huang is something else: a person at war with all the constraints that would fetter him to anything less than an identity capacious enough to contain all his contradictions and ambivalence.

#eddiehuang #freshofftheboat

It’s astounding, really, to hear what someone admires in you. I don’t know why we don’t go around thoughtfully complimenting one another all the time.

#nytimes #modernlove #mandylencatron #arthuraron #fallinginlove #science

I think that to withhold an opinion on the killings in France out of deference to perhaps the clash of civilizations, a personal knowledge gap, an unwillingness to stake out a position, or all of the above, as I've been doing, and to question, at a safe remove, as I do, whether the satire of Charlie Hebdo would've been stifled by the swirling, tendentious forces of political correctness and faux outrage in America, is to be unwilling to acknowledge that freedom of speech as a universal right is not really free. That right, whether what is expressed is humorous and insightful to one person, inflammatory and blasphemous to another, or just plain stupid to a third, must, I think, be earned, and the price is hearing. When we silence others (not only in public but in our own homes, and, increasingly these days, by our choice to follow or unfollow in our social media streams) out of disagreement, discomfort, disdain, or simple ignorance and disregard, we lose some of our standing to speak and be heard. We all lose. Speak up, but ask and listen more, and try, as much as possible, to hear and understand.

#charliehebdo #jesuischarlie #freespeech

The need to comfort ourselves is always strongest at the start, they say— do you think that’s true? my friend asked. I don’t, he said, I think the need gets stronger, he said, it just gets stronger.

from Ghosts in the Road, David Rivard

#poetry #davidrivard #poemaday #academyofamericanpoets #americanpoets

I, too, dislike it. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.

Poetry, Marianne Moore

#poetry #mariannemoore

Camerado, I give you my hand! I give you my love more precious than money, I give you myself before preaching or law; Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me? Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

from Song of the Open Road, Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

#leavesofgrass #songoftheopenroad #happynewyear #newyear #waltwhitman #whitman #poetry #travel #wanderlust

From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines, Going where I list, my own master total and absolute, Listening to others, considering well what they say, Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me. I inhale great draughts of space, The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine. I am larger, better than I thought, I did not know I held so much goodness.

from Song of the Open Road, Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

#poetry #happynewyear #newyear #waltwhitman #whitman #songoftheopenroad #leavesofgrass

She had, finally, spun herself fully into being.